Lesson #5: Discipline

In school and in the office, someone is - generally speaking - watching over
your shoulder and making sure you're doing what you should be doing. You can
get away with slacking when they're not looking, but you still have to report
to someone at the end of the day, or the week, or the semester. For most, this
is a strongly contributing factor in doing what you're actually supposed to be
doing. But this factor is non-existant in poker: You won't have anyone to
report to, there's no one who expects or requires that you do anything. You
are, for better and - in this case - for worse, your own boss. When the only
one you have to answer to is yourself, it takes a fair portion of discipline to
actually do what you set out to do.

... Or at least it should. If you've given yourself a lot of slack in what you
hope to achieve, this will be a walk in the park. But if you're serious about
taking the road of poker as far as it will carry you, your goals probably
shouldn't have too much leeway given for slacking. You should challenge
yourself.

Discipline is needed for many different areas of poker. For instance, returning
to Lesson #2 and the Anna example there, if she has set out to play 5,000 hands
per month, she needs to actually do that. Hopefully, you won't need to much
discipline to play the game. If you find that you just don't want to play, then
there is an obvious risk that you shouldn't be focusing on this game at all.

But Anna also specified which limits she was going to play at, and conditions
for when she would move down or up in the ranks. Really sticking to this, and
not refusing to move down after a bad downswing takes discipline; we all have a
little devil on our shoulder telling us that if we stay at the limits we're
playing (or even climb!) we can quicker win back what we've lost. Resisting
that urge takes discipline.

The previous lesson dealt with realistic goals in building a bankroll, with the
basic conclusion that it takes time, because the relative profits that are made
are low in comparison to the limits we play. If you make one or two big bets
per hour, how many hours of playing does, for instance, logging on and playing
while being roaringly drunk cost you? I'm not saying you can't be outrageously
drunk (I'm all for that) but recklessness can easily set you back weeks in
terms of bankroll progress. It's unnecessary.

You also need to be disciplined about other things, such as studying. If you've
told yourself that you will sit down and carefully read and analyze hands three
hours a week - because you know how important this is to your personal
development as a player - your job is not done there. Making the decision is
easy, it's actually doing it that's hard. "Easier said than done" is rarely as
true as when it pertains to planning homework. But while on the topic of
studying, again, I want to point out that while you'll need some discipline to
do the time that you've promised yourself you'll do, the part that's actually
going to require more discipline is the self-criticism, so let me talk about
that.

Psychologically, people are mostly very defensive. There are, for instance,
countless courses on how to give and take criticism because of this. I've
attended a few in the line of duty. If we were computers, receiving criticism
would be a piece of cake. Someone tells us we screwed up, we look at the
situation, objectively decide that he's correct, and adjust. In reality,
however, someone telling us we screwed up will trigger all sorts of
self-defense mechanisms in our psyche. The most common reaction is to claim
that the criticism doesn't apply to us. The second is to vividly argue (or at
the very least, feel) that we didn't screw up at all, and dismiss our critic as
ignorant: "he would never bluff in that spot!" or to blame something or someone
else. The third way of defending ourselves against criticism is to give
excuses.

Accepting criticism and embracing it is tough, and for me personally, it's even
harder to give criticism that I know can be accepted and embraced. However,
when you're asking someone else to analyze your play, you're in most cases not
asking someone who's professionally trained to give sensitive criticism, so
chances are he or she won't be as smooth or as harsh as they need to be. And so
again, you need the discipline to take it for what it is - someone else helping
you. But even after getting sore spot after sore spot poked at by other
players, you need to swallow your pride and keep asking for more of it. This is
the part that really takes discipline, but it will pay off and it's worth it.

Now, speaking of sore spots, I have one more piece of advice relating to
discipline to share in this lesson: the importance of being honest to yourself
when things aren't working the way you want them to. Maybe you're not putting
in as many hours of studying as you had originally planned. Maybe you went on a
terrible downswing and hesitate to re-count your bankroll to see just how bad
it's been going. But you already know that you should, and the only thing
standing between you and something you can and should do, is to actually do it.
Discipline.